How do you market a movie?

Answer: any way you can.

I am making a movie, and I have no idea who will want to see it. How do you get people to want to see your movie?

The best strategy, of course, is to make a kick-ass movie (in the words of Quentin Tarantino). You make a kick-ass movie, and you can take it all over the world.

Except that’s not quite true. I’ve seen kick-ass indie films that I thought would become blockbusters. And they went nowhere.

So making a kick-ass movie is not enough. You have to market the movie. You have to let people know it exists. You have to get people excited to see it.

Quick story: Malcolm Gladwell’s first book The Tipping Point floundered for years. Nobody read it. But Malcolm patiently plodded along an endless marketing tour, speaking at libraries and book stores around the country, till finally his book took off (which, incidentally, affirmed the book’s hypothesis about tipping points).

Anyway, what I take from that story is this: I should do every tiny thing I can do to get the word out about my movie so that it might crest over the tipping point between obscurity and success. Hence, blogging. Hello.